Sunday, April 8, 2018

Hatred of the dialectic

As part of his comment on the MeToo
phenomenon which is devoted to an attack on us, David North, Chair of the WSWS Editorial Board, resurrects an argument he
has previously used to dismiss all discussion of dialectics.He writes,

One
could not have a better example of sophistry, masquerading as "dialectical
logic." Brenner's argument is: MeToo may be guilty of reactionary
"overreach." But it has its good side too. The classic refutation of
this sort of phony dialectics is to be found in Marx's celebrated response to
Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy.” [1]

This is followed by a quote
from Marx.

It is interesting that North used exactly the
same argument against us in his series of articles titled “The Odyssey of Alex
Steiner” only this time in relation to a discussion of the Frankfurt School
instead of MeToo.He wrote at that time,

“Steiner/Brenner
are advocating a theoretical eclecticism that has nothing in common with the
philosophical traditions upon which the Trotskyist movement is based. Moreover,
the very form of their argument—"Can we not learn from...?"
"Must we reject everything...?" "Is there not something
interesting in...?"—epitomizes the sort of "on-the-one-hand,
on-the-other-hand" sophistry that Marx invariably subjected to the
harshest criticism.” [2]

This is followed by a footnote
referencing the same quote from Marx against Proudhon that North resurrects for
this occasion.

This argument from a decade ago
is followed by the same dismissal of any mention of “dialectics” that we see
today. North wrote then,

“Despite
all their rhetorical invocations of "the dialectic," Steiner/Brenner
fail to present a historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the
Frankfurt School.”

I showed on more than one occasion that North’s narrative on
the Frankfurt School is little more than a kind of crackpot philosophy. I will
leave that to those who are interested in the topic.On this occasion I only wish to address his
use of the Marx quote. [3]

In response to North, I wrote
at the time that,

“Marx’s
methodological point was that Proudhon was adopting a vulgar pseudo-dialectics
in creating his categories whereas his actual methodology was profoundly
undialectical.”

For North and his acolytes, the
Marx quote about Proudhon is brought out on any occasion when anyone mentions
the word “dialectics” whereas for Marx it served as an example of the
vulgarization of dialectics.And Marx
did not stop at the indictment of Proudhon as a vulgarizer, but later on
provides an example of what a genuine dialectical analysis of economic
phenomena looks like,

“The
production relations of every society form a whole…

In
constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of
political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated. The different
limbs of society are converted into so many separate societies, following one
upon the other. How, indeed, could the single logical formula of movement, of
sequence, of time, explain the structure of society, in which all relations
coexist simultaneously and support one another?” [4]

North never quotes this part of
Marx’s discussion of Proudhon because it makes clear that the alternative to
Proudhon’s vulgarization of the dialectic is a genuine dialectic. As I wrote at
the time in summarizing Marx’s treatment of Proudhon’s method,

“Note
that Marx first of all chastises Proudhon for neglecting the real dialectic of
wholes and parts here when it comes to examining the economic categories of a
society. Proudhon proceeded as if each part was separable from the whole and
thus those parts that were considered “bad” could be discarded while those that
were considered “good” could be maintained. But this method, as Marx said, dislocates
“the limbs of the social system.” [5]

North’s attempt to refute our
arguments by presenting them through the template of Proudhon is in any case
based on a willful distortion of what we wrote. We never wrote anything about
“preserving the good side” either of the MeToo movement or of the Frankfurt
School.What we did was point to the
contradictory nature of these social and intellectual phenomena. But for the
“theoreticians” of the WSWS, there are no contradictory phenomena.All one has to do is identify the class basis
behind a movement and you have all you need to determine its nature.Nor do they ever tell us how they go about
their identification of the class nature of these phenomena. (I should qualify
that on occasion they reduce the question of the class nature of a political
formation by examining the stock portfolios of its leaders. See for instance
their discussion of Syriza for an example of this “method”.) For the WSWS
pundits, there exists somewhere a pure and unsullied working class which is the
revolutionary class in society and likewise a pure and unsullied middle class
which is always reactionary unless they are somehow led by the divine
intervention of the WSWS to fall in line behind the working class. As we have
pointed out on other occasions, the “working class” of the WSWS is an idealized
working class that exists only in their heads and has little to do with the
messy problems involved in the real working class. For the WSWS pundits this
serves as a convenient way for avoiding the problems of class consciousness.
Thus, their dismissal not only of the dialectic, but also of any interest in the
dynamics of mass psychology.

But let us - as a kind of
thought experiment - agree with North that we are every bit the sophists that
he claims we are.We would then ask
North, given that Steiner and Brenner are sophists who only bring up “the dialectic”
as a ruse to cover up their sophistry - can Mr. North tell us what he thinks a
dialectical understanding of social and intellectual phenomena consist of?

The only thing we have gotten
out of North on the question of dialectics is the idea that dialectics is
equivalent to materialism and the latter consists in little more than
identifying what is real and what is in one’s head and after that all you need
to do is to determine the underlying class relations and their evolution.We are furthermore told very little as to how
any of this takes place.

Let us reduce all this to one
simple question as an example of the poverty of the North methodology: “What is
the class nature of Karl Marx’s theoretical work?”

Undoubtedly such a question
will elicit much outrage among the WSWS pundits and the Internet trolls who
populate the WSWS comments section. “Of course Marx’s work was working class!
To even suggest it was anything else is tantamount to a form of treason.”

But one might object that Marx
did not come from a working class background. His background was firmly middle
class and that of his wife Jenny was of the old hereditary aristocracy. That
did not change even when the Marx family lived in abysmal poverty during the
years of his exile in London. Moreover, his lifelong partner Engels was in fact
the manager of his family’s very capitalist manufacturing facility in the city of
Manchester. Furthermore, Marx rarely had contact with rank and file workers.
One of the few occasions in which he did was a speech he gave to a group of
German workers living in exile in Brussels in 1847.From his earliest years Marx was an active
journalist and part of what could be considered the radical intelligentsia of
Prussia. He was initially a radical democrat and only later did he become a
convinced communist who tied his fate to the struggles of the working class.
Was Marx’s intellectual and political evolution not a contradictory one? Is it
not more accurate to describe Marx’s class nature not simply as “working class”
but that of a person from the middle class whose ideas, as they evolved in the
fertile climate of the complex brew of intellectual and political trends to
which he was exposed, led him to embrace the cause of the working class?

To be sure there are occasions
where a discussion of the nuances of subtleties of class analysis are used
deliberately to obscure the class nature of competing political movements.But it is equally the case that labeling
something either “working class” or “middle class” without an investigation of
the contradictions involved in such phenomena becomes a convenient excuse for
abstaining from real life struggles. A good example of the latter was the
attitude of the WSWS towards the referendum of 2015 in Greece.They labeled the call for a referendum “a
reactionary fraud” but then - inconsistently - urged workers to cast their
votes in this “reactionary fraud” of a referendum.But anyone in Greece and internationally with
the slightest connection to the working class understood that while the logic
of the Tsipras government could only lead to a betrayal of the working class,
the fact that they were forced to call a referendum presented a golden
opportunity to educate the working class.That was not possible with the WSWS’s sneering dismissal of the
referendum.

There was indeed a similar
issue that came up in discussions with Trotsky in the 1930’s in relation to a
proposal for an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Ludlow Amendment.The Ludlow Amendment called for an end to
war. It encapsulated illusions in pacifism and the efficacy of bourgeois
democracy. Yet Trotsky’s attitude to this referendum was the very opposite of
the WSWS’s attitude toward the Greek referendum of 2015 which was also
intertwined with illusions. Rather than calling the Ludlow Amendment a
“reactionary fraud”, as the sectarians at that time were doing, Trotsky urged
his followers to participate in the campaign for the amendment and in the
process seek to educate the working class. He wrote,

“We must advance with the masses, and not only
repeat our formulas but speak in a manner that our slogans become
understandable to the masses…”

“The referendum is not our program, but it's a clear
step forward; the masses show that they wish to control their Washington
representatives. We say: It's a progressive step that you wish to control your
representatives. But you have illusions and we will criticize them. At the same
time we will help you realize your program. The sponsors of the program will
betray you…”[6]

It is not hard to guess what
Trotsky’s attitude would have been to the WSWS’s calling the Greek referendum
of 2015 “a reactionary fraud”.

As a final point I have
observed that over the years of our polemics with North and his acolytes, their
attitude toward the dialectic seems to have hardened. It is not simply that
they dismiss the dialectic, but their rhetoric indicates what can only be
described as a visceral hatred of the dialectic. This comes out especially
clearly in the comments of Mr. James Cogan, the leader of the Australian
section of the group that publishes the WSWS.Mr. Cogan writes,

“Or
will Mr. Brenner present a “dialectical” rationale, employing various abstract
invocations of Hegel’s logical categories I’m sure, as to the working class
should renounce democratic principles that were developed in centuries of
struggle against tyranny and oppression.”

Here the contempt for
dialectics is thrown together with a dismissal of Hegel’s logical categories,
our use of which, Mr. Cogan claims, amount to a renunciation of democratic
principles. Huh?? How does any of this follow from anything we have written?
It’s a bizarre outburst from someone that at one time would have been called a
cultural boor. But in the diminished intellectual atmosphere engendered by the
WSWS such remarks are considered profound and are guaranteed to generate much
genuflection by the trolls on the periphery of the WSWS comments sections.

As we said years ago, the time
when we thought it was possible to revive this sterile sect has long passed.
But perhaps there are still lessons to be learned by others about the fatal
destiny of a sectarianism wedded to a hatred of the dialectic.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

How would Steiner/Brenner go so far as to ask the above question "... can Mr. North tell us what he thinks a dialectical understanding of social and intellectual phenomena consist of?"How would they be feeling stuffy about the WSWS after so much time spent knocking at a deaf man's door?When it comes to the Metoo Movement, I am again convinced that the WSWS, including cultural warrior David Walsh, is too far removed from reality as well as ordinary people's atmosphere.In my country where gender inequality or sexual abuse has been too ingrained or prevalent, the Metoo Movement is even hailed as "a revolution that seems live up to its name."By the way, is it little more than a conspiracy by Democrats and greedy and jealous females in America?Too regrettable.

Davidson's article in "Weekly Worker" No 1198 questioning the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoise revolutions may help to explicate Comrade Alex's criticism of the SEP view of Marxist dialectics. Cde Alex quotes Marx to the effect that the "limbs" of reality are not separate entities but constitute the nature of the movement, the events of lived social and political reality. Davidson distinguishes between the social revolution which changes the relations of production between the major classes and a political revolution that changes the form of rule making it perhaps more democratic or more authoritarian as the contending classes struggle. Could we not see the social revolution and the political revolution as "limbs?" The "Me too" movement is not by a social revolution, but it is progressive in that women are struggling to acquire greater rights. Socialists are concerned with developing Marxist consciousness in the working class. It doesn't help to dismiss progressive demands such as those raised by women in the "Me too" movement as just the selfish grasping of the petite bourgeoise concerned solely with their stock portfolios.

In my own country, Karl Marx used to be one of the banned terms in public life until as late as the late 1990s.Indeed there were scholars mentioning or studying his ideas, especially in such fields as economics, sociology, and literary theory, but they seemed to be confined to a few college campuses or institutes, paled in comparison with the academic mainstream atmosphere. This was mainly influenced by anti-communism kindled continuously by the long periods of military dictatorship, when powerful elites readily took advantage of public fear of possible threats associated with the Cold War. Ironically, in what seemed to me a kind of reaction, Marx, along with his offspring, descendants, distant relatives from Lenin to Althusser to Che Guevara, was enthusiastically embraced by very many college students and laborers from radical unions.They were far from satisfied with the status quo, longed for the great transformation, and wanted at least the start of an upheaval. It was only Marx who seemed to them to propose a solution for a society of no inequality, exploitation, or conflicts. In retrospect, that was a quasi-religion, regardless of the validity of Marxism. Why? Especially among students, in all kinds of subjects from post-election perspective to dating violence to film review, sayings from Marx and his kin were cited. Everything was summoned to the Marxian court, where sectarian legalists contended by pointing to this or that section of the poorly translated Holy Marx Books. By the way, until when? Exactly the year 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union. After being dumbstruck or baffled for a while, they all fled and disappeared. (Of course, a very very few of them returned with Deleuze, Negri, Badiou and Zizek.)As for me, I am in no way hostile to the ideas of Marx. Rather, I think his ideas are more relevant now than at any other time. However, I always feel stuffed how the ideas are transformed to meaningful and productive practices on a permanent basis. Steiner/Brenner seems to me to try to solve this puzzle, sometimes walking across the beaten path and other times looking outside the box. For this reason, some people may have suspicion, but I consider their stance to be more sound for the same reason.I was at first drawn to Trotsky for his texts on culture and literature. I have had little time to attend to details of his philosophy(dialectics) or politics(transitional program). That’s why I enjoy visiting this blog. Thank you again for this great article that kindly outlines today's Marxism.

The gutter politics of David North

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) edition of May 17 featured a hysterical diatribe against me by the leader of that organization, David North.

Here we are today, 33 years after the split with Healy. Does the fact that North was on the right side of that split confer upon him the legitimacy of a hereditary monarch? Reading North’s comments, one would think that for him the Fourth International is some kind of franchise that he alone can operate. If the continuity of the Fourth International is to have any meaning, other than a ritualistic invocation meant to shore up the flagging morale of one’s followers, it can only be in one’s adherence to the program and theoretical conceptions of the Fourth International. If we examine the political conceptions and organizational practices of the group North has led for all these years it is clear that in all respects it bears little resemblance to the organization Trotsky founded in 1938. It is in fact our exposure of the hollowness of North’s claims to be the inheritor of the mantle of Trotsky that has so infuriated him. Why else would he be spending more time writing about me and Frank Brenner, two individuals, than about the Stalinists, Pabloites and state capitalists?

Trump and the crisis of liberalism

by Frank Brenner

It is tempting to say that 2016 marks the death of liberalism, but that's probably wishful thinking. What is dead, though, is the old 'centrist' political consensus, i.e. the pendulum swings from centre-left to centre-right that made mainstream politics in the West about as predictable (and stable) as an old grandfather clock. Now the swings are much more extreme - or rather the swings to the right are. (One might add that what led up to this was a major shift rightward of the 'center' itself from Reagan/Thatcher on – what Tariq Ali rightly dubbed the “extreme center”.

Lecture: Dialectics of Revolutionary Strategy and Tactics

Alex Steiner gave a talk at the Locomotiva Cooperative Cafe in Athens, Greece on July 9, 2015, shortly after the historic vote for NO - OXI -in the Referendum of July 5. The event was a huge success attracting a packed audience of about 50 people. The talk was sponsored by the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK) and was chaired by Savas Michael-Matsas. A Greek translation of this talk is now available. The translation was first published in the theoretical journal of the EEK, Revolutionary Marxist Review, in the issue of November 2015-February 2016. The translation was the work of Eve Manopoulou.

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